Kiki and Herb are Trying – Soho Theatre Walthamstow, London

 New York cabaret legends Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman bring their acclaimed characters, Kiki and Herb, back to London for the first time since 2007. “18 years on, look at us now, in Walthamstow…” Kiki tells us with barely suppressed disappointment, riffing on the comparative likelihood of being stabbed in North London versus being shot in New York. She’s determined to make the best of not getting a West End venue.

The ingredients in Kiki and Herb Are Trying remain the same as they have since the performers met in the late 1980s, although the political polemic feels toned down. Deliriously funny monologues, with near-unhinged logic, bitter emotional pathos, and apocalyptic rage, mashed up with cover songs and medleys from a bewilderingly offbeat array of different musical genres.

The narrative drive is provided by the pair’s slow but steady transition from mildly intoxicated to utterly inebriated, from barely restrained trauma to near complete emotional collapse, driven by copious amounts of neat Canadian Club. “I’d have clogged arteries if it weren’t for Herb’s drinking”, Kiki confides. “It’s time to make Mama pretty,” she says, as she tops up her glass.

Unless you have seen the madness of Kiki and Herb, their brilliantly drawn characters are hard to describe. Here is a stab at it. Kiki (Justin Vivian Bond) is not a drag queen in the RuPaul sense, though she pays homage to drag traditions.  She is something stranger, more unholy and unnerving: think Liza Minelli or Shirley Bassey on an acid trip (both them and us), viewed through the haze of smoke and a cracked mirror. Reverent and riotous, nostalgic yet brutally nihilistic, she is Marlene Dietrich disassembled, defiled, and dragged shrieking into the present. Kiki is not doing drag. She is drag.

The Kiki of old has mellowed somewhat, but she can still sell a song even if she cannot always sing it: Bond’s raw, melodically fractured voice is a deliberate, theatrical assault on conventional norms of vocal beauty. Putatively 95 years of age, Kiki’s breasts are now on a gentle but noticeable downward slope. In the first half, she is bedecked in a shimmering, purple sequinned black dress, wears diamond bracelets, and has a black bow in her hair. Spying something unexpected under her chair, she wonders whether “it’s my earring or my uterus”. In the second, it is a skimpy, crimson-red outfit, which she credits to her good friend Isadora Duncan (Kiki once claimed to have had an affair with Jesus, so it fair to say she may be an unreliable narrator).

At one level, pianist Herb (Kenny Mellman) plays the traditional role of the smooth, composed accompanist. But there is something dark about Herb, too as he trades barbs with Kiki across the stage. Jittery, distracted, emotionally frayed, possibly from decades of co-addiction to alcohol with his companion (the duo first met, chained to the same radiator in a mid-west children’s home), he is on the verge of a catastrophic collapse. The man, putatively in his 90s, was recently smuggled out of Thailand in a medically induced coma. A dark, gender-flipped version of Bruce Springsteen’s I’m On Fire, delivered by Herb as a ballad, hints at why. At one level he, like Kiki herself, is a metaphor for queer survival and endurance.

Now, in the fullness of cognitive decline and suffering from “osteoporosis of the eardrum”, Kiki’s first half anecdotes take us through the highs and lows of her iconic life. These include friendship with Sylvia Plath (“she wanted to be a showgirl, but she just didn’t have what it takes”), her love affair with an under-equipped Jeff Bezos (the phallic iconography of Amazon’s logo is “a fallacy, literally”, we hear), and another affair with Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia which gained her a passport. The second half sees Kiki muse over the challenges of motherhood. “The kid’s got an abscess, I’ve got a show, I’ll worry later,” is her explanation for social services removing her daughter. At least she has her non-binary grandchild (who calls themself Opiod in an attempt to soothe their mother’s suffering) as company.

Mellman’s piano playing is unique, brilliant yet erratic — jazz flourishes, unexpected and seemingly random dissonant notes, moments of violent intensity followed by impeccable subtlety. Musical highlights include Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart, delivered as an angsty refusal to bow down to ageing, Michel Legrand’s Windmills Of My Mind, seemingly sung at double speed, and Marc Almond’s A Lover Spurned as a tribute to erstwhile loves. Gil Scott-Heron’s poem Whitey On The Moon, set to a 70s funk beat and sung entirely without irony, also impresses. Kiki and Herb are Trying is a mad, brilliant, iconic piece of theatre.

Runs until 5 July 2025